"'Be wise now, therefore, O ye kings, be ye Instructed, judges of the earth;' so God Cries in our Scriptures in the ears of men. 'Kiss ye the Son,' He says, 'in homage kiss The Son of Mine anointing, Christ the Lord, Kiss Him lest He be angry, and His wrath Ready to be enkindled you devour. But in the living scriptures of the soul Itself, the holy word of God in man, The selfsame admonition beats and burns-- If men would read it and would understand! The raging of desire not satisfied, The sickness of the surfeit of desire, The ravages of passion uncontrolled, And waste of being, by itself consumed, To bury or deface what else were fair-- Like lava spouted from the crater's mouth Of the volcano burning its own bowels To belch them torrent over fertile fields-- These things, O Felix, in the conscious heart, Are muffled footfalls of oncoming doom." Peculiar commination seemed to flame, Volcanic, in Paul's manner as he spoke. One might have felt the figure prophecy-- For some fulfilment in this present world Impending to be symbol of his thought-- His likening of the self-consuming soul, Disgorging desolation round about, To a volcano its own entrails burning, And in eruption pouring them abroad; So real, so living, so in imminent act, Paul's speaking made his fiery simile. Drusilla, when, long after, with her son Agrippa, born to Felix, overwhelmed In that destruction from Vesuvius Which under ashen rain and lava flood Pompeii rolled with Herculaneum, Like Sodom and Gomorrah whelmed again!-- Drusilla then, despairing, for one fierce Fleet instant--instant endless, though so fleet-- Saw, as from picture branded on her brain, Heard, as from echo hoarded in its cells, The very image of the speaker's form, His posture, gesture, features in their play, These, and the tones, reliving, of the voice Wherewith, in Cæsarea judgment-hall, He fulmined, yea, as if this self-same wo!